Irrespective of how needy or affluent a child's family may be, the Lib Dems now expect each and every taxpayer to cough up to feed those little Janets and Johns. How times have changed.
In November 2011, Nick Clegg and other Lib Dem ministers were pushing hard for the means-testing of universal benefits to be announced in the autumn statement. These calls were rebuffed by the Conservative half of the coalition, who feared a public backlash against any such announcement.
Nevertheless, Clegg pushed on. He called on "millionaire pensioners" to sacrifice, amongst other benefits, their free TV licenses. "There are some people who are well-off and obviously don't need the benefits they are getting," one unnamed Lib Dem source told the Telegraph. "That's a point we are going to be making from now until the end of this parliament."
The cost of giving free TV licenses to everybody aged over 75 costs the taxpayer in the region of £550 million each year. Two years ago it was unconscionable to Mr Clegg to keep handing out such vast sums in a universal benefit irrespective of the recipient's ability to pay. Today he is proposing to create a new universal benefit costing the taxpayer an even larger sum. What a difference plummeting opinion polls two years makes.
Not only that, the move is completely at odds with the government's decision to take child benefit away from the better off.
(Nick Clegg claims the free school meals announcement is the price he extracted from the Conservatives for the Lib Dems abstaining on a vote to introduce the tax break for married couples widely expected to be announced at the Tory party conference next week - a tax break believed to be worth a paltry £150 a year, but more on that another time).
I won't bother discussing the merits or otherwise of the free school meals policy, other than to say it is patently absurd to ask working parents paying tax on their minimum wage earnings to subsidise the meals of very affluent families.
One issue worth considering, however, is the effect this will have on another Lib Dem policy; the Pupil Premium.
At present, each school receives an additional £600 each year for each pupil who is eligible for free school meals. The only means local authorities have of ascertaining how many children are eligible for free school meals (and therefore the pupil premium) is to literally count the number of children who actually receive them. It is down to the child's parent(s) to apply for free school meals; should the family of an eligible child not do so for whatever reason, the school misses out on the pupil premium for that child.
Do you see the problem? Once we remove the need for parents of children aged 5 - 7 to apply for free school meals, it will become impossible for local authorities to accurately say how many of those children would have been eligible under the present scheme, and therefore what pupil premium each school should receive.
So not only have the Lib Dems have decided to throw hundreds of millions of taxpayers money at families who don't need it (the benefit to families is estimated to be £400 per eligible child per year), they have needlessly created another level of bureaucracy, which will need to be paid for, to continue their pupil premium scheme as is.
As the Taxpayers' Alliance succinctly put it, "It's no wonder Westminster fails to deal with unsustainable levels of Government spending when it is so keen on finding new ways to throw other peoples' money at a problem that politicians have created themselves."
It is vital that children eat healthily and exercise regularly, but the responsibility for ensuring that lies with parents alone. Perhaps if the government stopped taking quite so much of other peoples' money and splashing it around willy nilly, particularly on pre-election giveaways, we wouldn't have quite so many families struggling to feed themselves adequately.
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